Arca's Warped Beauty

With his new album Mutant, experimental maestro Alejandro Ghersi continues to use his ever-morphing sounds to break down binaries while delving deep into the flickering limbos between healing and chaos.

Not two minutes into our conversation, Alejandro Ghersi is already talking about labyrinths. There’s one in Barcelona he says I must visit, where a topiary maze is pocked with ruined-looking neoclassical sculptures. "It's overgrown and mossy and green,” he says. “A really special place.”

His enthusiasm for such a locale is fitting. The music he records as Arca often feels both fungal, like a post-apocalyptic future as seen from a spore's point of view, and labyrinthine. It’s this evocative and spontaneous quality that has attracted collaborators like Kanye West, Björk, and FKA twigs, and some of his most exciting work so far has taken the form of long, undulating solo compositions full of sidewinding synthesizer melodies and beats that fold in upon themselves. His 2013 mini-album &&&&& stuffed 14 movements into an unbroken, 25-minute stretch; then there was this year’s Sheep, a seesawing runway score that shape-shifted across African chants, European choral music, slow-motion car-crash beats, and the wailing of wooly livestock.

His new album, Mutant, follows a similar logic. Unlike his more piecemeal full-length debut from last year, Xen, many of the new record’s 20 tracks flow together almost imperceptibly, one song springing out of the tail end of another like taffy being pulled. "That's one of the few things on the album that doesn't happen unconsciously,” says Ghersi. "There was something about the way &&&&& flowed that I really loved, but there was also an autonomy to each of the songs on Xen that I loved." Mutant, true to its title, offers a hybrid approach. "I guess you could say I prefer the word 'and' to 'or,'" he continues. "It's this and this and this—but every unit is its own little universe."

Like all of his solo offerings so far, Mutant can be hard to wrap your head around. The album's melodies are slippery, elusive things. They bob like eye floaters, refusing to come into focus; around them surges a riot of colors, textures, and shuddering rhythms. At any given moment some sound or another is either coming into being or in the process of disintegration. The music's organizing principles feel almost biological—if you could amplify the sounds of proteins going about their biochemical business, you suspect it might sound something like this—so it is appropriate that Jesse Kanda, Ghersi's friend since both were young teenagers, complements his music with imagery depicting strange, waxy bodies that seem to wear their organs on the outside. Kanda's imagery suggests what humanoid forms might look like after another 100,000 years of evolution—an entirely appropriate accompaniment for music so fearlessly and bewilderingly futuristic.

Mutant cover art by Jesse Kanda

Even more than Xen, which Ghersi now calls a "fragile" album, Mutant is made up of great extremes—the crushing bass of "Mutant" versus the viscous bliss of "Vanity", or the metal chug of "Anger" versus the neo-classical strings of "Extent". And one of the things that is so exhilarating about the record is how it’s constantly negotiating between two opposing poles. Tension is the air that Mutant breathes, and that is because Ghersi himself thrives on what he calls "those in-between states where you can talk to people about things that maybe aren't OK to talk about otherwise—things that are taboo or repressed within us, things that we would never admit to ourselves."

Self-portrait by Arca

Pitchfork: You've said that you were surprised by how vulnerable you let yourself be with Xen. Do you feel the same way about Mutant?

Arca: When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious. When I was making Xen, I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn’t deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.

I try to get my subconscious to puke out as much stuff as I can because I'm really not judging myself while making music. Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, Hold on to Your Dreams, one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music. If I crave a frequency in the mid, I'll just drag in a sound and try to mold it into what feels right. It happens very quickly. And if I've been making a piece of music for five hours and it sucks, I'll just throw it away. There has to be an entry point to learn about myself, or an idea I've never tried, because then I can try on a new skin and see the world through a different perspective. If I have that spark, then I'll save the file.

Pitchfork: Something that stands out on the album is your sense of structure, both within individual tracks and across the album as a whole. Even when the music is very chaotic, it feels very composed.

A: A few years ago, I had an interest in making things that felt more like "pieces." That was when I was making a lot of stuff that you could call beats, and it dawned on me that I could say much more nuanced, precise things if I tried to make them more composed. It sounds a bit corny, but I do love the idea that something can make you forget that you're listening and just transport you to somewhere else in your head. I try to have things change before I get bored, and I figure other people might enjoy that too; I try not to let anything repeat for long enough that you can get used to it. You become more animalistic when you don't know what's coming next—you have to be on guard, but at the same time you're also more receptive.

Something I keep coming back to is the tension between two extremes: healing and chaos, hope and anxiety—these big themes are inside us, flickering, all day. You might be raised as a boy in a very conservative environment and then somehow, at some point, there was a side of me that felt really powerful and sensual in a way that was more feminine. For me, it's not about living my life as a boy or a girl—but I'm also not trans—it's just that one day you wake up feeling masculine, and one day you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what's most fertile for me. It yields ways for me to relate to people that are different from myself and opportunities for me to turn shame into something healing. It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

Self-portrait by Arca

Pitchfork: It seems like there's a new aesthetic being developed by artists like you, Lotic, Rabit, Elysia Crampton, and Total Freedom that's heavy on stretched and plasticized sounds, explosions, breaking glass. Most of the artists affiliated with this sound are also queer. Do you think that's a coincidence, or is there a conscious attempt to create a new, experimental queer aesthetic in electronic music?

A: I attribute that explosive cacophony—that soul-baring quality—to Total Freedom and Shayne Oliver and Venus X’s GHE20G0TH1K parties in New York, which was the complete birthplace for that style. I always call Shayne my gay mother. When I moved from Venezuela to New York when I was 17 and went to that party—it was like a modular synth patching all this energy into a route that could be catalyzed and harmonized and amplified. Meeting all these individuals who were so free and comfortable with themselves was an important part of my musical journey. I remember going alone for my first GHE20G0TH1K. It was in some basement, the cover was like $3, and I was there too early because I was really nerdy. I was blown the fuck away. They were playing, like, slowed down hardstyle with a Rihanna a capella over it. It was about exploding highbrow and lowbrow.

Shayne was playing the CDJs like an instrument. He was using cue points and cutting up the tracks and using it like a drum machine before anyone ever did that. Shayne invented a style of DJing that was so confrontational and aggressive and euphoric, like clashing up an industrial song with a Three 6 Mafia track. This completely punk energy—Shayne is the king of that.

And then Total Freedom is the king of painting through chaos. He pioneered a way of saying something really quiet in the middle of a thunderstorm. He's exploding people's eardrums, and what comes after that is sweet and tender. One of the most magical moments I've had in a club was when he played glass crashing for five minutes. Everyone stopped dancing. And then he played a YouTube rip of Beyoncé singing the national anthem, drowning the whole room in echo. Everyone lost their minds. It was so insanely free. That was a miracle to witness. That's why he's so magical to me. Just being himself, Total Freedom taught me a whole vocabulary of chaos.

Pitchfork: You use a lot of voices on the album, but they're rarely distinguishable as voices.

A: I have an interesting relationship with my voice. When I was 14 or 15, I was making pop music and singing over all of it. I had an unspoken treaty with myself to never lie in my lyrics, so, for a long time, when I wrote love songs, I would use genderless pronouns, like "dear" and "darling"—like some kind of granny! At some point, to get more popular in high school, I started pretending that I was straight, and saying "girl" or "chica." When I went to college, I pulled the plug on all of it, because I didn't want to lie to myself, and I went into a cocoon. When I came out of that cocoon, interestingly enough, I came back with instrumental music. And then I slowly added vocals again—and that became Stretch 2. I had a whole record after Stretch 2 that was more hip-hop-based, with tons of vocal manipulation, but it felt like it wasn't something that only I could say, so I pulled the plug again. I give myself tons of freedom in how to engage with my voice because I respect it a lot.

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. There's often two words that are close in meaning, yet what I'm trying to say is in between them, or it might be a little more layered and nuanced. Having this conversation with you is exciting, because I can feel you resonate, even though we're on the phone. That's really beautiful to me. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words. It struck me at some point that the things I wanted to say had to be wordless. I had to renounce words in order to go deep into thepractice of making materials and textures that would express what I'm trying to say more accurately. But I do love voices so much that I will use them and manipulate them. The presence of a human voice in a piece of music is really exciting, even if it's just someone's breathing.

Pitchfork: I thought I heard the sound of a wolf breathing on the album.

Pitchfork: The track "Soichiro" is somehow named after your friend and visual collaborator Jesse Kanda, right?

A: Yeah, that's his Japanese middle name, which I think is really badass. It's like a Yakuza name. And the track "Snakes" is a nod to Björk, because we're both snakes in the Chinese Zodiac. I mention this because I'm keen to be really explicit about howmy way of seeing the world is influencedby the people I love and have around me. If Xen was me sending a letter into the depths of myself, then Mutant is a big celebration. It's more social and open.

Something about the way "Soichiro" quivers, and the way it was really bold, reminded me of Jesse. Jesse and I met when I was 14 and he was 15, so talking about him is like trying to talk about your left leg or something—you have so many memories with your left leg, but where do you start?

Pitchfork: There's a contradiction in some of your work together. On one hand, it celebrates a fluidity between genders, but there's also an element of the grotesque to a lot of it.

A: It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating. The [“Vanity”] video is like a whole other level of insanity. I'm just preparing for it to be taken off YouTube.

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. And something I always find beautiful about Jesse's work is that he finds beauty without any calculation. People say that his work is dark, but he never sees it as such. For him it's all almost about educating people to process why they feel disgust.

Pitchfork: There's a similar contradiction in the video for "EN": Your movements are very bold, but the image is distorted. It's simultaneously revealing and masking.

A: I shot that video myself, and when I showed the footage to Jesse, he was like, "Hm, maybe you could distort it more." That has more to do with mirroring how the audio and video feel, harmonizing how the energy of the song feels slanted or warped. The song sounds like you're listening to it through a fisheye—it's claustrophobic, but there's a vanishing point that you can focus on that makes it feel like there is more space.

The idea of making eye contact has been really important to me throughout this record. It struck me that the only way to do this album justice is to look right into the camera and show my face and not be afraid. To make myself vulnerable and make it possible for people to disagree and lash out or to agree and feel that they're present with me.

Pitchfork: You mentioned how the track “Snakes” is a nod to Björk, did she influence Mutant elsewhere as well?

A: She shaped the album in ways that she's aware of and ways that she's not. When you make music, you have a friend who you share with, and she's that friend. Tracklist, videos, song selection—she was always gracious and joyous to be there during that process. Also, I wouldn’t have had the same confidence to say the things as boldly if I had not met her. When you actually make a new friend, and you make music and laugh really hard together, that can give you a lot of confidence and nourishment and encouragement. It's hard not to get too mushy about it, but if she never put music out, my music would sound totally different. I would listen to her music when I was figuring out how I felt about music, and in that sense it was a profound influence. I've internalized so many ways of feeling by just listening to her music.